Halloween costume?

Found this via Outsapop. Cute!

Technology

You may remember my recent post on how expensive technology can be for developing nations. On top of that it may not be the best way to introduce them when society can't support them.

Recently I read that there are organisations that promote technology with the local context in mind. Grameen Shakti, GS, (founded by Professor Yunus, Nobel Laureate) introduces renewable energy (e.g. solar PV) to rural areas that have no access to electricity. They use the micro-utility model -

"Under this model, one entrepreneur installs the system at his own premise and share the load with some of his neighbours. Owner of the system is responsible for making installment payments to GS, more than 50% of which is covered by the rents he collects from the users of his system. Micro-utility model has become very popular in the rural market places and has helped to increase business turnover by extending business hours. More than 1000 micro-utility systems are operating in the rural market places."

It is like the poor helping themselves. With the electricity generated, the villagers lives are improved, especially for the women (improved living environment esp for cooking). Apparently, the villagers are also trained to become technicians for the renewable energy systems.

I think this is a good way of getting the underpriviledged involved in renewable energy and becoming part of the post-carbon economy that the developed countries are moving towards. No one should be left behind :-)

He's back!

The local unofficial recycling man is back! He's been out of action (most probably due to the fall in prices) since the last time I saw him. Apparently, the market for recyclables is recovering....

Eeks! Where germs are lurking!

Hawker centres? Food courts? Canteens? .... Toilets? Just had a look at the NSF Report "Where Germs Are Lurking" and they found a lot of favourable places that encourage bacterial growth and potentially a good environment for lethal bacteria such as E Coli and Salmonella.

Their experts swabbed key surfaces in local schools, grocery stores and other public places. Past studies have shown that "objects such as water fountain spigots and cafeteria trays had more microorganisms than the commonly cleaned areas such as bathrooms and gym mats."

Keep those hands clean... this reminds me of the Washy washy clean song (pls excuse the English) that the Singapore government recently introduced to the kids during the H1N1 outbreak.

Via Ecochildsplay

Plants means happier kiddies!

Does your school/university have plants? According to this study, it does make a difference :-)

Ecochildsplay says that "Previous studies have shown houseplants can help clean indoor air, reduce tension, improve coping mechanisms, boost work productivity and help increase concentration and attention."

via ecochildsplay.com

Blog Action Day Climate Change 15 Oct 09

I've signed up for the Blog Action Day! Those who have registered will blog on climate change on 15 Oct 09 :-)

Not getting very far with my dress

Well, I have got as far as adding the lace to my newly cut neckline. The only thing I can't decide now is whether I should leave the excess lace as it is, or should I twist it into a rose? Think! Think! I can't believe it is taking this long!

Recycling Day

Do you want to roll out the green carpet for your participants?

Some ideas from UNEP on how to green your meetings. It's actually written for UN meetings, but I think the manual can be applied across the board.

The Guide consists of five different elements:

Section 1: “Green meetings: what to know”

Part A: Introduction - an introduction to the concept of greening meetings, and the benefits this can bring to the organisers, especially UN organisations.
Part B: Management and Communication – guidance on management and communication aspects of greening meetings.
Part C: Greening your meeting – an overview of the key environmental impacts of a meeting, and how these may be minimised - especially venue selection, accommodation, catering, local transportation, logistics.
Part D: Climate neutrality – proposals for offsetting greenhouse gas emissions generated by a meeting, especially through the impacts of long-distance travel in order to leave a positive “Climate Legacy”.

Section 2: “Green meetings: what to do”

Part E: The Greening Meetings Checklist - detailed greening recommendations for the day to day preparation of a meeting.


I cringed a little when it came to the section on choosing the location of the meeting. As you know, the Climate Change meeting will be in Copanhagen . .... well, everyone is flying there. The report recommends that participants offset carbon emissions. Then there's the issue about staying in 4 or 5 star hotels. It says "The more luxurious a hotel is, the higher the consumption of water. On average, hotel consumption of water per guest is 220 litres; this goes up to 520 litres in 4 and 5 stars hotels - the main consumption of water is due to wellness centres, swimming pools and laundry services."

A banana peel takes....

two years to biodegrade! That's according to keepbritaintidy.org. Andrew Gilchrist, a writer at the Guardian UK, says that "The John Muir Trust, which protects many of Scotland's wild places, has just given banana-skin chuckers a stern ticking off. The trust estimates that there are now 1,000 banana skins strewn across Ben Nevis. Walkers, it seems, don't realise that it takes ages for a banana skin to degrade: two years, in fact."

So, the best thing is to take your litter home, or bin it!

How long it takes for your litter to degrade:

Paper bag - 1 month
Apple core - 8 weeks
Orange peel and banana skins - 2 years
Cigarette end - 18 months to 500 years
Plastic bag - 10 to 20 years
A plastic bottle - 450 years
Chewing gum - 1 million years

Should we save the pandas?

TV naturalist Chris Packham says that pandas should be left to face extinction as they are not worth saving. WWF says otherwise.

This article first appeared in the Guardian UK.

I've extracted the article below. What do you think? Do we just care about the cute species? Funny that both of them didn't come up with a figure for how much was spent on protecting the panda.

=============================

Yes, says Chris Packham
Chris Packham is a naturalist and presenter of Autumnwatch

==========================

I don't want the panda to die out. I want species to stay alive – that's why I get up in the morning. I don't even kill mosquitoes or flies. So if pandas can survive, that would be great. But let's face it: conservation, both nationally and globally, has a limited amount of resources, and I think we're going to have to make some hard, pragmatic choices.

The truth is, pandas are extraordinarily expensive to keep going. We spend millions and millions of pounds on pretty much this one species, and a few others, when we know that the best thing we could do would be to look after the world's biodiversity hotspots with greater care. Without habitat, you've got nothing. So maybe if we took all the cash we spend on pandas and just bought rainforest with it, we might be doing a better job.

Of course, it's easier to raise money for something fluffy. Charismatic megafauna like the panda do appeal to people's emotional side, and attract a lot of public attention. They are emblematic of what I would call single-species conservation: ie a focus on one animal. This approach began in the 1970s with Save the Tiger, Save the Panda, Save the Whale, and so on, and it is now out of date. I think pandas have had a valuable role in raising the profile of conservation, but perhaps "had" is the right word.

Panda conservationists may stand up and say, "It's a flagship species. We're also conserving Chinese forest, where there is a whole plethora of other things." And when that works, I'm not against it. But we have to accept that some species are stronger than others. The panda is a species of bear that has gone herbivorous and eats a type of food that isn't all that nutritious, and that dies out sporadically. It is susceptible to various diseases, and, up until recently, it has been almost impossible to breed in captivity. They've also got a very restricted range, which is ever decreasing, due to encroachment on their habitat by the Chinese population. Perhaps the panda was already destined to run out of time.

Extinction is very much a part of life on earth. And we are going to have to get used to it in the next few years because climate change is going to result in all sorts of disappearances. The last large mammal extinction was another animal in China – the Yangtze river dolphin, which looked like a worn-out piece of pink soap with piggy eyes and was never going to make it on to anyone's T-shirt. If that had appeared beautiful to us, then I doubt very much that it would be extinct. But it vanished, because it was pig-ugly and swam around in a river where no one saw it. And now, sadly, it has gone for ever.

I'm not trying to play God; I'm playing God's accountant. I'm saying we won't be able to save it all, so let's do the best we can. And at the moment I don't think our strategies are best placed to do that. We should be focusing our conservation endeavours on biodiversity hotspots, spreading our net more widely and looking at good-quality habitat maintenance to preserve as much of the life as we possibly can, using hard science to make educated decisions as to which species are essential to a community's maintenance. It may well be that we can lose the cherries from the cake. But you don't want to lose the substance. Save the Rainforest, or Save the Kalahari: that would be better.

============================

No, says Mark Wright
Dr Mark Wright is chief scientist at the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF)

============================

You are reading this because it is about giant pandas. We could have this argument about the frogs of the rainforest, and the issues would be identical, but the ability to get people's attention would be far lower. So in that sense, yes you could argue that conservationists capitalise on the panda's appeal.

And, to be fair, I can understand where Chris is coming from. Everywhere you look on this planet there are issues to be addressed and we have finite resources. So we do make really horrible choices. But nowadays, almost exclusively, when people work in conservation they focus on saving habitats.

Chris has talked about pandas being an evolutionary cul-de-sac, and it's certainly unusual for a carnivore to take up herbivory. But there are many, many other species that live in a narrowly defined habitat. When he says that if you leave them be, they will die out, that's simply not true. If we don't destroy their habitat they will just chunter along in the same way that they have for the thousands of years.

And besides, in terms of its biodiversity and the threats it faces, I think that the part of China where pandas live should be on the preservation list anyway. The giant panda shares its habitat with the red panda, golden monkeys, and various birds that are found nowhere else in the world.
The giant panda's numbers are increasing in the wild, so I don't see them dying out, and I haven't heard anything to suggest that other biodiversity isn't thriving equally.

It is true, though, that there some some cases where preserving an animal is not the best use of resources. If you asked 100 conservationists – even at WWF – you would probably get 90 different answers, but look at what happened with the northern white rhino in Africa, which we're pretty sure has died out. We lament its loss. But at the same time it had got to the stage where the likelihood of success was at a critically low level. If you were doing a battlefield triage system – the rhino would probably have had to be a casualty.

Otherwise, charismatic megafauna can be extremely useful. Smaller creatures often don't need a big habitat to live in, so in conservation terms it's better to go for something further up the food chain, because then by definition you are protecting a much larger area, which in turn encompasses the smaller animals.

And of course they are an extraordinarily good vehicle for the messages we want to put out on habitat conservation. Look at Borneo, where you instantly think of the orang-utans. In the southern oceans, you think of the blue whale. Then there are polar bears in the north. There are things you pull out from the picture because people can relate to them. And it does make a difference.

Feather Wingblade

Park & Cube has a great DIY for a T-shirt and wool, but I'm thinking of using scrap material instead of the wool! This is a great project.....

Image via Park & Cube

Cartoons

OK, I'm extremely late, but I watched this movie this afternoon with my hubby and son. I loved it, and the message of the impact of man destroying earth is so loud and clear. For those of you who missed all the buzz about it, go and see it! :-)

There are other cartoons that have environmental messages too, and I think most of us in Asia will be very familiar with these. They are made by Hayao Miyazaki, Studio of Ghibli. The most recent one is Ponyo, while the rest were made in the 80's and 90's.

a) Princess Mononoke

b) My Neighbor Totoro

c) Spirited Away

d) Ponyo

e) Laputa: Castle in the Sky

f) Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind

(images via Wiki)

Profits before people

(Image via Eco-chick)

Eco-chick blogged about an article that was published on Earthfirst.com.

Go check it out. I think it gives people a different perspective of what companies really do. OK, Exxon Mobil and Nestle are well-known evils, but some of us may have been tricked into believing all the greenwashing e.g. Wal-mart.

You may recall my post about the Green to Gold Book by Daniel Esty & Andrew Winston. It does mention the sustainability programmes that Wal-mart, Ikea etc do, and it even devotes a few pages on steering clear of greenwashing. But obviously, that's only part of the story (ie. child labour, and encouraging heaps of consumerism) :-) Some of you may have read "Ikea – you can't build a green reputation with a flatpack DIY manual"

(Image via The Guardian, UK)

Although, many companies have a corporate social responsibility programme of some sorts, the corporate seems to be over emphasised, while the social bit is probably a paper exercise which gets pushed to the back burner until the auditors or media come in ("quick, get the file out!"). The big oil companies are probably the worst. Yes, they might have a renewable energy section, and yes, they are looking at alternatives. BUT, it doesn't change the overall direction the companies are taking, which is oil, oil and even more oil. Then, there are the companies that started with good ethics, such as The Body Shop, Ben & Jerry's and Burt's Bees, only to be sold to the corporate giants who may not share the same principles but want a big share of the environmental movement (ie. jumping onto the green band wagon).

The Body Shop - bought over by L'Oreal, of which 26% is owned by Nestlé

Ben & Jerry's - sold to Unilever; you can read about B & J post-Unilever takeover in this article.

Burts Bees - sold to Clorox. You can read more about it in the NY Times.

(Image via Tree Hugger)

One Planet

Listen to the latest programme (17 Sep 09) of One Planet on the BBC. They talk about cities and why people gravitate to them. Another interesting interview on the programme is with an environmental psychologist. I didn't know that they even existed! The env. psy. explains why there are people in denial about climate change (or may be other environmental issues), or why others don't do anything about it even though they know the problem exists. He says it's because they think that it will only happen only in another country or further away in time. He says that policy makers shld make things personal so that pple will take action! Very interesting!

Technology

There's a lot of technology around to solve pollution issues, whether they're existing ones (e.g. landfills, scrubbers for the chimneys) or new flashy ones (e.g. PVs) :-)

But I have a few questions on my mind:

a) can the developing nations afford them?

b) even if someone rich sponsors them, will the latter be able to maintain the tech for the rest of its lifespan?

c) does everyone benefit from it? what about the poor? what about those who live at the bottom of the pyramid? Will building a huge landfill benefit the people living in the slums?

Then even if we come up with great technology, you still need to think about:

a) can it be manufactured at low costs so that it is affordable?

b) when will its price drop so that it's affordable to everyone (e.g. like computers) ?

c) then when it is affordable, do you have enough money to market it to the millions....

Sponge design - hangers & yoyos

My friend Coboypb blogged about a great design/DIY blog. They've got some great projects, and this one's really easy peesy. If you have one the metal type of hangers, the cover will be a great way to protect your clothes from snagging.

I also like the yoyo project. Get out your stash of scraps now!

Get out your scraps!!

Via: Coboypb

Photos from Sponge Design

Zerofabric

Well, not really zerofabric, but Fashion Creation without Fashion Waste Creation. Fashion designers will make a pattern (design) and then it will be cut from a piece of fabric, which is a long piece of material that goes on and on. But everything is from a design point of view. They don't think about how to design with the piece of fabric in mind... am I making sense?

But there are designers who understand the need to make use of every bit of the fabric. There's one guy who uses the method of subtraction cutting.... and Timo Rissanen studies how to reduce waste from fashion creation.

Photos and info via: Fashion Creation without Fashion Waste Creation

Smoke gets in my eyes

Ugh, they're burning incense and paper again. I hope this is the last day of the Chinese ghost festival. OK, the photo is really bad!

DIY: Non Toxic Litmus (Magic Ink) Painting

I've been hunting for some non-toxic paints for my son (now 4 years old!) and the only brands that I have confidence in are the European and Japanese ones. The rest... sigh.. well, you know! I ended up getting a European set of poster paints from Popular for less than S$10.

Have been searching around for really non-toxic paints, and this is what I came across! Do you remember using litmus paper in your Chemistry or Biology classes in school? The stuff that changes colour when you add it to alkali or acid? Well, Leslie at Oko box blog has a recipe for making your own litmus paper from red cabbage and when you paint it with natural paints (ie. lemons, vinegar, baking soda). It's a bit like the magic ink/paper you see sold for ridiculous prices at the bookstores.

Can't wait to try this with the little one, and it's a great project for them too! You can eat the cabbage too! Only thing is I haven't seen any red cabbage being sold at NTUC Fairprice... anyone know where I can get it?

Photo from Oko box blog.

Energy Challenge Week in Singapore

Did you take part?

How To Fabric Covered Box

Don't out throw out your boxes! I've got a stash of them at home from the toys that my son got over the years. Think this is a good way of making them pretty for storage.

How To Fabric Covered Box

View more presentations from kootoyoo.

Closet Quickies

This is similar to Salvation Army and Oxfam. Closet Quickies in Indonesia sells 2nd hand clothes and passes part of the proceeds to Indonesian Street Children Organization.

Location : Jln. Bangka Raya No 103, Kemang – Jakarta Selatan

Found via: fashiondaily.com

Ingenious

Who needs to buy them when you can make them at home? :-)

Reuters clip via ecofriend

Humour

Saw this via Eco-chick!

From the August 24, 2009 issue of The New Yorker

Update on my latest recon

OK, I've signed up for another 4 months.

Slooooowwwllleeee making progress on my black dress. I forgot to take a before, so I will need to dig out some old photos of me wearing it.

I changed the boat neck to a V-neck. Made the dress shorter to knee length (from shin length) and then added it to the V-neck part as shown above to make it stiffer. That will be folded in. Also added some lace which I bought from Spotlight. So far so good!

Update on 23 Oct 2011 - ha ha ha, after searching, I finally found the photo where you can see me in the original boat-necked dress. Gosh, it took me THAT long to find it!

鳥

鳥 (Birds)

誰道群生性命微？
一般骨肉一般皮。
勸君莫打枝頭鳥，
子在巢中望母歸。

白居易 (Bai Ju Yi, 772-846AD)

This is a great poem from the Tang Dynasty (618-907AD). The Tang Dynasty was a great period for China: stability and progress, while the arts flourished. Most of the Tang poems use a lot of nature as the backdrop, like mountains, clouds, bamboo, flowers and trees.

This poem by Bai Ju Yi tells us not to abuse animals (well, in this case birds). I'm not a good translator but basically it says:

The life of a bird is no smaller than a human. They are of flesh and blood just like us. Do not abuse the new born chicks, for they are awaiting their mother's return.

I remember a few incidents in Singapore where cats and dogs were found abused. It was unacceptable to Bai Ju Yi over 1000 years ago, and it should remain socially unacceptable today.

Report animal abuse :

SPCA - call 6287 5355.

Singapore passed laws in 2002 to raise the maximum fines and jail terms for animal-cruelty offences to $10,000 and 12 months respectively.

Pic - Wikipedia

"Conformity is anonymity"

So says Natalia Allen. She is a young innovative designer who was honored by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader. Very impressive. She was awarded Designer of the Year from Parsons, a title she shares with Marc Jacobs and Proenza Schouler. What is special about this lady?

She set up her own company (just after she graduated), Design Futurist, specialising in sustainable design. I think we need more people like her. :-) Check out her blog, too!

Victoria E from Groovygreen did an interview with her too.

Inconsiderate

A lot of people are burning incense,candles and paper offerings for the Hungry Ghost Festival. I saw this on Stomp. Sigh, such an eye sore. The councils have set up specific areas for this activity but we still get a few who are inconsiderate.

Photo: Stomp

I like this reconstructed T-shirt!

This is great for Singapore's hot weather!




From Threadbanger.com

Recycled brollies

A couple of designers in the UK are reclaiming broken umbrellas (brollies!) and making them into bags. They use everything, apart from the metal parts. Proceeds of the sales are channelled to projects in Zimbabwe that teach the girls and women their useful skills. Good idea!